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After a discussion of family histories last week with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icarus_after, I was inspired to dive back into the genealogy pool that I've dabbled in for the last few years (my mother was recently kind enough to gift me with a subscription to ancestry.com). I ended up finding census records for my great-grandmother when she was a child. The records confirmed what my mother and I have suspected for a while since I found some other stuff a couple of years ago. My great-grandma and her entire family was listed on the 1900 census as black. She moved from Georgia to Texas with my great-granddad and...voila!...in the 1920 census she was suddenly white! There are so many questions that will never be answered about this and it's sad and fascinating all at once to me. Was she passing when she met my great-grandfather or did he know? This was back in the day of the miscegenation laws, mind you. Would she have ever told my grandfather anything about her past if she'd lived longer? She died in 1925. My grandfather was only 13. His father lived a long time and never said anything about it.
My grandfather is so completely without guile and is completely clueless about any of this. He's 95 years old. Would it be fair, at this point, to take his history away from him? Doubtful. He's lived such a long time perceiving himself to be a certain person. He is, without being a racist, still very much a product of his time. I think it's a safe assumption that he would not be nearly as thrilled as my mother and I. Still, there is something in me that chafes at being party to keeping a secret that was born of such a disgraceful chapter from our southern past. I feel complicit somehow by not telling him. I feel especially tempted to lay it out full force when he tells my mom that he could never vote for Obama because...well..."he's black."
The right thing to do in principle is not always the kinder and best thing to do in the specific. Three generations later, and the compromises that come with the color of one's skin still hold sway. So I hold my tongue and keep my bargain--my silence for the certainty that the last shreds of this shame his mother felt for who she was will live only as long as he does.
icarus_after, I was inspired to dive back into the genealogy pool that I've dabbled in for the last few years (my mother was recently kind enough to gift me with a subscription to ancestry.com). I ended up finding census records for my great-grandmother when she was a child. The records confirmed what my mother and I have suspected for a while since I found some other stuff a couple of years ago. My great-grandma and her entire family was listed on the 1900 census as black. She moved from Georgia to Texas with my great-granddad and...voila!...in the 1920 census she was suddenly white! There are so many questions that will never be answered about this and it's sad and fascinating all at once to me. Was she passing when she met my great-grandfather or did he know? This was back in the day of the miscegenation laws, mind you. Would she have ever told my grandfather anything about her past if she'd lived longer? She died in 1925. My grandfather was only 13. His father lived a long time and never said anything about it. My grandfather is so completely without guile and is completely clueless about any of this. He's 95 years old. Would it be fair, at this point, to take his history away from him? Doubtful. He's lived such a long time perceiving himself to be a certain person. He is, without being a racist, still very much a product of his time. I think it's a safe assumption that he would not be nearly as thrilled as my mother and I. Still, there is something in me that chafes at being party to keeping a secret that was born of such a disgraceful chapter from our southern past. I feel complicit somehow by not telling him. I feel especially tempted to lay it out full force when he tells my mom that he could never vote for Obama because...well..."he's black."
The right thing to do in principle is not always the kinder and best thing to do in the specific. Three generations later, and the compromises that come with the color of one's skin still hold sway. So I hold my tongue and keep my bargain--my silence for the certainty that the last shreds of this shame his mother felt for who she was will live only as long as he does.
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From:
A bit of a friend's story
A friend of mine, she and her husband were both born and raised originally in the rural south; both black. Both of them are middle-aged and up (her husband is more than 15 years her senior). He and his sister (not sure if there are/were more siblings) are the children of a single woman, a dirtpoor sharecropper. Her husband is, I believe, the youngest child.Talking about family and related, my friend told me one day that her husband's mother had been forcibly raped and sexually abused by the white owner of the farm that she worked, eventually becoming pregnant several times and having at least two children, one being my friend's husband. His mother, in short, was forced to work and submit to repeated acts of rape and sexual abuse her entire life, and her children also worked as sharecroppers on the same farm. My friend's husband, I believe, also did sharecropping work on the same farm.
When sometimes I hear about the legacies of American slavery which apparently officially ended in 1963 (what year did Lincoln issue the proclamation? bad with history details, eh!), it doesn't mean the brutalities ended. Black women and girls (and the rarely discussed aspect of black men and boys) being raped, sexually abused, and bear the children of their rapists while forced to serve them, during slavery continued - continues - to happen. Not always, these days, by whites, but unfortunately perpetuated within family as incest, other horrific abuse, etc. which you know better than me.
Separately my friend was incested when she was a child. She's very soft spoken and shy about some things. She does show various signs of trauma in different fashions, not necessarily attributed only to the incest.
One of the things that bothers her is how much denial there is in the black community that incest happens within, too. She hears many other black men and women truly believe that incest only happens in white families, etc.
From:
Re: A bit of a friend's story
From:
Heh: I just like talking too much :)
And they were really tangential, but your initial revelation (surprise, joy, as well as mixed feelings re: telling grandfather) really hit me. And, so I felt I had to "share" in my own fashion even if perhaps off the mark. My stories are not only from a different nation (a different world, heh) but also seemingly from a different dimension within the U.S. at times, or so it seems.
Thank you for being so gracious to me whenever my mouth overflows. :)
From:
Ack! 1863, not 1963